So you know that TV/movie/life trope? The one where two people are getting down and dirty and just as they begin to have sex, the dude finishes unexpectedly and sheepishly utters some take on the phrase "Uh, this never happens…" Well, actually it does happen. A lot.

Advertisement

According to Dr. Harry Fisch, prominent urologist and expert on men's sexual health prominently featured on Howard Stern, Dr. Oz, and plenty of talk shows, nearly half of men finish the job within two minutes. As he writes on Nerve:

There have been studies in which couples consented to be scientifically observed having sex, and one of the observers timed each session with a stopwatch to make a fairly accurate assessment about the length of the coupling. Not surprisingly, there is an extremely large variation in the time it takes a couple to have sex, ranging from the excessively short (about two minutes or less, which famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey dryly noted was a "frequent source of marital conflict") to the "Are you done yet?" (over forty minutes).

An astonishing 45 percent of men finish the sex act too quickly, which is to say, within Kinsey's conflicted two minutes. That's pretty speedy. Way too speedy for the average woman to be able to have an orgasm through vaginal penetration alone. At least five minutes, and more like seven, is usually what's needed for a woman to be able to achieve orgasm.

Quite a disparity there, huh? Well first of all, there's plenty of ways to get a woman off, so don't fret too much. But also, this is part of Fisch's promotion for his new book, The New Naked: The Ultimate Sex Education for Grown-Ups, wherein he works to reinvent sex ed for adults and teach (presumably hetero) couples how to sex each other good. So don't worry un-climaxed women, there's hope for you yet.